It’s true what they say about women…

This poem first appeared in an on-line magazine called Cahoots which comes out of the mythical Canadian province of Saskatchewan.  

I thought it was very beautiful and it reminded me of adoption although I do not think that was the poet’s intention.

On Surrendering by Sarah Tsiang

It’s true what they say about women. Wearing that white flag so handily, a skirt, a handerkief, linens blowing across enemy lines. Our bodies taught us this art of surrendering, loosened us so we could let go of

Blood

Milk

Children

Let your fist fall open, lie back: know that this child needs so much more than blood,
and that small space to

dream bone, sinew, first muscle.

Breathe

and hold within yourself
a place for him — a burrow, warm, dark and large
enough to contain a name, a nest of bark, the almost-heat of your body: a place deep enough

for a heart-slowed winter’s sleep.

It’s true what they say about women.

Peace

UM

From the moment of birth….a moment of truth

I was commenting on another blog the other day that I almost thought it funny that I was once an UNWED MOTHER!!!! The Victorian morality of it all. It’s so weird and, of course, so sad because that Victorian morality was responsible for a lot of harm in the world.

As an aside – Pejorative term that it was, it at least contained the word mother. As a second aside, it just occurred to me that If that UNWED MOTHER was writing this blog she would sign it with the same initials I do – UM.

How much I feel that unwed mother person was someone else. I don’t know where she came from. I guess she was what was left of me when I was beaten down, betrayed, abandoned and terrified.

I was one of the people who was never even allowed to see her baby. Why the heck I didn’t get up out of the bed, say “Fuck You!” to anybody who tried to stop me and go to see MY baby I don’t know. I know that’s what I would do today. To the point of being arrested if they tried to stop me.

It is only recently that I have found out what the theory behind the forbidding of any mother/child time together. I was told this was because it would help me, allow me to heal. You know, get on with my life. It was what was best.

This is from “Authoritative Knowledge and Single Women’s Unintentional Pregancies, Abortions, Adoption and Single Motherhood: Social Stigma and Structural Violence,” by Marcia A. Ellison, in “Medical Anthropology Quarterly“, 17(3), 2003, p.326.

“The Post-World War II Adoption Mandate — “From 1960-70, 27 percent of all births to married women between the ages of 15 and 29 were conceived premaritally. Yet the etiology of single, white, middle-class women’s conceptions had shifted again and were now perceived as symptoms of female neurosis (Solinger, 1982; Vincent, 1961). In keeping with this medical model, a single pregnant woman could obtain a therapeutic abortion if she could find a physician willing to diagnose her as psychologically unsound, or if her pregnancy could be diagnosed as life-threatening. However, the approval of a board of hospital physicians was necessary to obtain a therapeutic abortion and 53 percent of teaching hospitals and 40 percent of all U.S. Hospitals, and thus their boards, required that women accept simultaneous sterilization to prevent a future unplanned pregnancy (Solinger, 1998:24). … Given those constraints, the majority (85-95 percent) of single, white, middle-class women, who either could not or would not procure an illegal or therapeutic abortion, were encouraged, and at times coerced, to adopt-away their child (Edwards, 1993; McAdoo, 1992; Pannor et al, 1979; Solinger, 1992, 1993).

Maternity homes became institutions where neurotic pregnancies could be cured by separating single mothers from their children (Solinger, 1992). By the 1950s, attachment theory dictated that this separation occur as soon as possible after birth, to promote an infant’s ability to bond with its married adoptive parents (Berebitsky, 2000).”

You don’t have to have been in a home for unwed mothers to have had this experience.

Why does it always seem to come down to what works best for adoption?

Attachment disorder – indeed.

Peace

UM